I can't stop thinking of Greenpeace hanging the RESIST banner behind the White House. One of the best symbolic protests I've seen.

I’m thinking of RESIST as I write a new story and I wonder how many people truly understand that the first step of every artist is to resist.

Not mindless clichéd resistance like Hollywood’s Rebel Without a Cause or the mythic Campbellian BS of The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Not even the adolescent white man-child resistance against everything and everyone Salinger popularized in Catcher in the Rye.

No, I mean resistance where the artist tries to truly understand the world. And then creates something to express their understanding.

An artist’s truest resistance is to understand life and then act. And there are many ways to act.

For me, as a writer, I write stories. Other artists act in different ways. Art is as diverse as all humanity, so there are countless ways to act on one’s understanding of life.

And all humans are artists in different ways. All humans can strive to understand life and act on what they discover.

So when I think RESIST, I think WRITE. When I understand RESIST, I turn to writing as my main means of ACTION.

Other people turn to different means of changing the world. But together we form a wave of understanding and action which can’t be resisted.

Because ultimately all our acts of resistance feed into one another. The end result is a power which no one can stop.